Category Archives: Organization

Here it is… the 100th post on Room to Think! And here I am, with a wonderful matching set of furniture in my office (thanks to this blog for keeping me accountable). The furniture, of course, was not originally matching! Most of it was from Goodwill and the rest from Craigslist. Ever since moving into this apartment, our office room has struggled to stay organized and uniform, so I decided to take the next step and paint a few pieces to match. Here is the before picture of our bookshelves, which are now moved into different places in our apartment and look much cleaner!

My campaign desk, painted ‘Restorative White,’ has always been a favorite piece in the office and I wanted to change the other mis-matched pieces (bookshelf and wooden file cabinet) to match. Thanks to my mom, I was able to paint both of the pieces in one day. We began with creating clean surfaces by sanding the pieces down. The bookshelf had a thick layer of high-gloss stain that was stubborn to sand off and the file cabinet was painted tan.

After the sanding, we applied a thin coat of primer to prep the surface for the new paint.

{Sanded/Primed file cabinet}

Finally, after the primer dried, we could try out the ‘Restorative White’ paint on the pieces. Two coats were sufficient before applying the polyurethane coat with a rag. This ensures a shiny, protected layer over the paint.

Restorative White paint makes the pieces look clean, mature and vintage. The bookshelf and file cabinet would look even better if I could find brass hardware-accents for the corners. As a total, these three furniture items cost me $25 and the paint cost $20. Our coordinating furniture in the office gives the room a brighter and more uniform appearance!

Back to blogging after a week without my laptop. Apple managed to save everything off of my hard drive after it crashed. They replaced the hard drive and gave me a complimentary key board replacement.

I wanted to focus this post on the work that has been put into organizing and decorating the Study Room in our apartment. The study has had many purposes over the last year, including a video-gaming room and storage space for bikes, tires etc. We finally got this room into better shape by re-organizing and giving away old unnecessary objects. So much of home-decorating and organizing involves ridding your house of anything that isn’t regularly used. A great question to ask is “Does this room look better with or without this ….(couch, chair, table)?” For us, it was “Does this room look better with or without the chair, table lamp, mini-fridge, and TV?” As embarrassing as it is, here is a before picture of our study when it was transitioning between being a separate TV spot to becoming an actual Study (sorry for the blurry picture, it makes it even worse doesn’t it?)

This corner of the room has undergone many changes and looks completely different now. The give-aways ended up being the TV, mini-fridge and pink chair and the room has certainly benefited from it. My decorating projects (Campaign Desk, Chalkboard, and Globe) gave the room a History or Library theme, which was intentional because my husband loves history. We shifted the desk over to the other corner of the room so that it is now the first thing you seen as you walk in.

It is so refreshing to get rid of things that make a room less attractive. We are looking forward to more organizing projects in the study (specifically the closet!)

I’m sorry for the long silence! Since making a resolution to work on Hailey’s nursery a few weeks back, we’ve had a minor (but welcome) setback. We found out that Hailey will be a big sister in about 8 months! Although we are super stoked for this event, so far I have been feeling really sick and also suddenly developed gluten intolerance. So…you may not be seeing many posts from me. Today I’m feeling great so far (praise the Lord).

After the post about Hailey’s room I cringed when I saw her bookcase in it’s disarray. I’ve never been great at arranging bookcases, so I decided to work a little harder at it. Here is the before:

I decided to remove all the “big girl” books from the shelves – you know, my childhood favorites that I’ve been saving all this time in hopes that she will love them too. I can easily stash them somewhere else in the name of decluttering! So after removing the books and finding some giveaways while I was at it, I rearranged, placing non-book objects between clusters of like books, and stacking the books various ways to give some variety to the shelf. Here is the after: